THE NEW YORKER the fourth generation. Four rears ago, after having given away about 50,000 trees, Jones organized the Nantuck- et Nurseries, which specialize in trees adapted to coastal planting and ship thenl to other places. Thousands of Jones- grown black Japanese pines have been planted at Jones Beach, along the 1\;lon- tauk Highway, and on other sections of the coast as far north as Glouces- ter Jones takes an immense pride in. the success of this tree and in the part he has played in toughening it up. "The black Japanese pine," he read in a paper before the Nantucket Historical Associ- ation in 1925, "is the only tree that thoroughly en joys a salty gale and goes through the most violent northeaster '-' without turning a needle." Most of J ones's pines managed to have a good time even during the hurricane last fall, and those that weren't washed out of the ground suffered no damage. Jones hates the Nantucket deer, which rub their horns on his trees and eat the nee- dles during the winter snows. He would kill every deer on the island if permitted to, and has a special licence to shoot any deer he catches on his property. He once dug up an old Massachusetts law according to which, if a deer injures your property, you can bill the state. J ones frequently inspects the bark of his trees for injuries inflicted by deer and has sent several bills for damage to the Massachusetts Department of Fisheries and Game. Altogether he has collected over $500 in this way. Next to trees, Jones's chief interest on Nantucket is the island's fishing in- dustry. He o'wns three or four fishing boats himself, including the celebrat- ed schooner Gertrude L. Thebaud. As president of the Nantucket Fishermen's Association for five years, he raised this group's membership from 37 to over 250, and was instrumental in getting the Massachusetts Legislature to give Nantucket exclusive control of the wat- ers about the island for three miles out. This means that Nantucket fishermen may now spread their nets over this area without competition from fisher- men from Martha's Vineyard, the Cape, and elsewhere. Jones made an effort to get the fishermen to return to sail- boats, arguing that the power-drawn dredges of their motorships damaged the shellfish heds. This attempt failed large- ly because th e present generation of Nantucket fishermen, with the exception of Tones, don't know how to sail. He helped get the shellfish laws changed so that shellfish are now sold by the pound rather than the quart, gallon, and bushel. 27 ; CAftØ"' il flEA ((SolrtetilrteS 1 g-et the feeling- that she's tryinj!: to tell1J e s011 ething.)' . '[his has done away with fights arising from differences of opinion as to what con titutes a standard quart, gallon, and bushel and when a bushel basket is to be considered full. Jones has a private shellfish bed at his place in Nantucket and usually wears a blue beret when he is showing it to guests. He likes to rake in a dozen cher- '-- rystones, dump them into the beret, and explain how to open them without losing the sea-water flavor. The trick is to hold them in a horizontal position so that the sea water doesn't run out, open them from the hinge side, and eat them without wasting a second. He is sure this is the right way to open clams. The fact that nearly all professional clam- shuckers in restaurants open clams from the opposite side and let the sea water run out before they serve the clams causes hinl acute distress. He would like to reform clam-opening, but his tree-raising and jobs like the Empire State Building and the Fair have taken up so much of his time that he hasn't done anything about it beyond remark- ing, from time to time, that "the pres- ent system of clam-opening is the god- . damnedest nonsense I ever heard of." He uses the same phrase when he speaks of a good many other prevailing systems, especially the economic system. He h'ls written a lot about economics, including a book called "Debt and Pro- duction," in which he calls attention to the fact that since 1910 debt has been growing faster than production, that the debt structure is doomed, and that it is just a question of time before the inter- est rate falls to zero. "Deht and Pro- duction" was published in 1933, and ] ones feels that the decline of the in- terest rate since then has tended to bear out his thesis. He likes to tell peo- ple, especially bankers and economists, that all economic mathematics is pure symbolic nonsense. In 1934 he wrote "Horses and Apples," a book calculated to prove this. In it, Jones explains that since you can't multiply horses by apples, or add horses to apples (save by having horses eat apples) , or subtract apples from horses, or vice versa, price indexes (which are arrived at by impossible mathe- matical computations of this sort) don't mean a thing. Thus the so-called price level computed in this manner is arith-